May 12, 2010

Stop Me Before I Veto Myself!

The Obama administration threatened to veto parts of its own health care bill after budget scorekeepers found that the package would add at least $115 billion more to government health care spending.

What next? If we don't give him whatever he demands, will he threaten to tell everyone that he was really born in Tierra del Fuego? But wait, there's more; President Barack H. Obama is actually using his own fabricated figures to extort something out of his own Democratic Congress:

President Obama's budget office charged Congress with finding $115 billion in spending cuts or tax increases to offset the price tag hike. The figure approached the amount of money the Congressional Budget Office previously estimated the law would save, and pushed the total 10-year cost of the package past $1 trillion. It comes after a separate Medicare office report found the bill would raise spending by about 1 percent over the next decade.

But the Office of Management and Budget stood by the administration's original claims that the law would reduce the deficit and tasked Congress with making sure that happens -- or else.

Is anybody else reminded of a bizarre scene from the Mel Brooks movie Blazing Saddles? Cleavon Little, the black sheriff sent to clean up a racist town, is about to be run out of town. So he points his pistol at his own head and says, in a deep, fake voice, "Hold it! Next man makes a move, the [pejorative deleted] gets it!"

"He's not bluffing!" shouts one of the panicky townspeople.

Aside from the surreality of Obama threatening to immolate his own odious health-care takeover, the real scandal here is the president holding his own bill hostage until he gets a big, fat tax increase. (And the casual admission that the extra amount the bill will cost is just about the amount Obama and the Dancing Democrats said it would save. Who'd a thunk it!)

But as they say on the Ginzu Knife commercial, that's not all...

Costs could go higher, because the legislation authorizes several programs without setting specific funding levels.

And that's not even counting the infamous "doc fix," the 21% "pay cut" for doctors Medicare reimbursements that was enacted as part of ObamaCare. The vaunted projections over hundreds of decades that show huge savings all relied upon slashing more than a fifth from physician reimbursements... which everybody knows is never going to happen.

In fact, the House already passed a bill to nullify the pay cuts, and the Senate will surely follow suit. The doc fix adds from $208 billion (Yahoo's prediction) to $245 billion (CBS) to the actual cost of ObamaCare, sans accounting tricks.

Add the two together, and the cost is already up by (averaging) more than $340 billion -- and deep, deep into the red. And the only solution acceptable to the Democrats will naturally be... yet more tax increases! Probably a Euro-style "value added tax," which taxes everything at every level of manufacturing, distribution, and sale... the greatest economy-buster and job-killer ever invented by the socialist mind.

We're shocked, shocked to discover there's brazen corruption at the International House of Obama. But how about this for our response: If Obama threatens to veto his own bill -- let him. Can we at least get all 41 Republicans in the Senate to agree not to rescue Obama from the veto pen he's holding against his own head?

If we can't successfully filibuster a massive tax increase -- the only purpose of which is to appease the Obamacle -- then we may as well just pack it in and return to the primordial ooze, whence we came.

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» Stop Me Before I Veto Myself! from The Greenroom
Ahem. To be filed in the “I warned you” file under C for chutzpah: The Obama administration threatened to veto parts of its own health care bill after budget scorekeepers found that the package would add at least $115 billion more to govern... [Read More]

Tracked on May 12, 2010 6:53 PM

Comments

The following hissed in response by: Jane Bowen

It is what it is my fellow American. Sorry we're in it together...optimism is not your forte. God be with you...

But I thought the line-item veto was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. (After reading the argument against, I am tending to agree.) I guess signing statements can be just as valid for 44 as they were for 43.

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